The Water Magician

The Water Magician is a 1933 silent film (with benshi accompaniment) by Kenji Mizoguchi.

Takino Shiraito (played by Takako Irie) is a water magician in a traveling funfair in northern Chubu, somewhere between Kanazawa and Naoetsu. She’s famous for her artistry in controlling long paddles that direct streams of water into shapes and patterns that enthrall her audiences. She meets a miserable carriage driver who rides her into town on horseback after his carriage breaks down. Shiraito has a golden heart and, taking on the role of mother (a recurring figure in Mizoguchi films; the boy is also an orphan), resolves to pay his college tuition in dribs and drabs and sends him off to Tokyo so he can become a lawyer.

The story is singular and tragic. The boy does complete his studies, thanks to Shiraito, who, despite her own struggles, manages to send him money regularly. But her determination to help him and others ultimately leads to her downfall. Unable to keep up her payments, she offers herself to, or is assaulted by, a usurer, and is later robbed by the carnival’s knife thrower. In the commotion, he drops a knife, which Shiraito picks up after regaining consciousness. Convinced the usurer arranged the robbery, and enraged at what she has lost, she returns and kills him in what appears to be self-defense during another attempted assault.

Later charged with murder, she is both shocked and overjoyed to discover that the prosecutor is the very boy she helped rise to his position. She urges him to carry out his duty, which he does reluctantly. Shiraito is sentenced to death but instead takes her own life in the courtroom. The boy later shoots himself on the banks of the Asano River.

Water as a symbol of purification and the passage of time (one of the final lines: “The river flows on as before and as it always will”), suicide as an act of ultimate love, and the rigid confines of social roles are all themes here, as in many of Mizoguchi’s films.

I found much of The Water Magician compelling, particularly in how it explores Shiraito’s inner life. No matter what misfortune befalls her, even her inevitable early death, she continues to find enough good around her to move forward, albeit in a deeply self-sacrificial way.

A few notes: 

• Shiraito “bit out her tongue in the courthouse,” the benshi tell us. Suicide by biting off one’s tongue appears in some Chinese literature and films set in ancient China. This was the first time I’d come across it, and in Mizoguchi’s film it seems to be taken literally.

• The Water Magician was adapted from a novel by Izumi Kyoka titled The Righteous and the Chivalrous.

• Shiraito’s lover, the boy Kinya, was played by Tokihiko Okada, who died at the age of 31 from tuberculosis, a year after the film was made.